


Purr

by GretchenSinister



Category: Guardians of Childhood & Related Fandoms, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Fluff, Other, but as cats, eldritch guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23087779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: #sometimes the lord of dreams and the nightmare king take the form of kittensThis tag overtook my brain for a couple days. Please take this result.
Relationships: Pitch Black/Sanderson Mansnoozie
Kudos: 9
Collections: Blacksand Short Fics





	Purr

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 9/16/2013.

The longhaired orange tabby came with the house, apparently. On her first morning there, Kathy woke up with its warm weight draped across her legs. When she started to move, the cat gave her the most disappointed look she had ever been given by anyone in her quarter-century of life.

“Well, I’m not you,” she said defensively. “I can’t stay in bed all day.” The cat just stared at her as if she had said something particularly stupid. She rolled her eyes and laughed, then wiggled out from underneath the animal, slipped on her robe, and headed to the kitchen to make breakfast. While she was a little annoyed that the cat hadn’t been mentioned as part of her residence agreement—what if the she had been allergic? Professor O usually thought of things like that; he was eccentric, not careless—she thought it might be nice to have a pet during her fellowship semester. It wasn’t like she was going to get a lot of living company otherwise, as she sort-of-house-sat for the retired professor and book collector who owned this massive Victorian pile that, despite its size, nearly vanished into the wilds of upstate New York. After all, why would she want to leave? All the best, rarest books on magic and dreams lined these shelves, including hundreds, no doubt, that modern scholarship had no idea existed.

She wouldn’t admit to drooling when she ran her hands over the spines in the formal library, but she knew it would be difficult to keep focused on her dissertation here.

“I can’t be tempted into fiction again,” she declared to the cat, who had followed her into the kitchen. It rubbed its face and side against her calves, and she smiled. “Let’s see if good old Professor O left you any cat food. Or else I guess you get to share this bacon.” The cat rubbed against her legs with more force than before at this second suggestion, almost knocking her over as she began to walk towards the cabinets, despite its small size.

Oddly, there was no cat food in the cupboards, and no empty spaces that indicated where it had run out. There was no litter box in any of the likely places either. “Are you…an outdoor cat then? Eating mice?” Kathy asked, scratching her head. The little orange cat seemed both far too chubby and to have far too nice a coat for that to be the case. The cat only stared at her, its head tilted to the side, its yellowish eyes wide.

Kathy shrugged, and turned back to the bacon. “Wait,” she said after a moment and craned her head to look at the kitchen door. There was a cat flap there, conveniently leading outside. “Was that there before?” The cat only looked down and started to clean one of its front paws. “O-kay.”

“Professor O didn’t tell me about you, so I don’t know your name,” Kathy said a little later, as the cat licked bacon grease from her fingers with a small, rough, pink tongue, “but I need something to call you. How about…Sandy? That’s nice, right? Just popped into my head.” She used her free hand to gently scratch the top of the cat’s head and it began to purr. “No objections? Sandy it is, then.”

It turned out to be surprisingly nice, working with Sandy around, once Kathy got used to him (this pronoun admittedly a guess) and his oddities. He utterly rejected any cat food she bought him, and seemed perfectly content to live off of whatever she was eating, to sometimes odd extremes. Once, she caught him licking a plate that had held a gooey cinnamon roll earlier and had said, exasperated, “But cats can’t even taste sweetness!” And Sandy had looked as embarrassed as a cat could look. After that, she never caught him stealing sweets again, but she had her suspicions. As for other considerations, he must have been trained to go outside, since she never found evidence to the contrary.

As a cat to work with, rather than simply live with, Sandy had a few more peculiarities. Like all cats, he slept as much as he could get away with, and his favorite sleeping position was “attached to Kathy in some way”, which required some adjustment of her usual writing set up. As the weather got cooler though, the mutual advantage of this situation quickly became clear. Kathy felt sure she wouldn’t have been having such good dreams when she herself slept if she hadn’t had Sandy’s small, furry body pressed against her side or across her legs.

More pertinent to her work, however, was that when he was awake, he had the remarkable talent of knowing which of the books spread before her she needed for the next part of a chapter outline, or which held a particularly relevant quote, because he unerringly would find some way to sit on it until Kathy petted him enough for him to return to her lap and fall asleep again. Kathy realized, after a few weeks of this, that he was actually making her more efficient. “Are you the resident dream expert?” she asked, scratching under his chin. He purred like a well-tuned motorcycle after that, but otherwise didn’t answer.

Then, of course, there were the ordinary strange cat things, like appearing on the other side of locked doors, which he was startlingly good at. Staring at things that weren’t there, which he had mastered as an art. Fitting into spaces that would have seemed to have required some dimensional jiggery-pokery to have held even a kitten.

Sandy’s final strangeness was something rather simple, though. He never made a sound other than a purr.

Which was why, when Kathy woke to a loud meowing late one night, she was understandably alarmed. Something invisible weighed on her chest, and she struggled for air and the bedside lamp simultaneously. The low-watt bulb turned the invisible thing into a svelte shorthair, long-legged and totally black, save for its yellow eyes. “What?” she said helplessly. “Where did you come from? The cat door?” It shot her a look of utter scorn at the suggestion, then turned that look onto Sandy, who had been curled against Kathy’s neck until the commotion began.

The black cat hissed at him, but Sandy only purred and walked across Kathy’s shoulder to gently head-butt the newcomer. The black cat backed away and looked confused.

“Oh for—” Kathy yawned. “I’ll deal with you two in the morning. Just don’t kill each other.”

Of course, by morning, the black cat was nervously stalking around the house like it had never nervously stalked around anywhere else, and so any thoughts Kathy had of evicting him (?) were immediately discarded. The charm on the little gold collar around his neck held no identifying information, and when Kathy mused about making ‘missing cat’ posters, he had bitten her. Pitch, as Kathy decided to call him based on his coloring, fit in rather well with her and Sandy, though when she said that aloud, he gave her a loud meow that sounded almost like “no” and disappeared for six hours.

He made her laugh, really, with his approach to cat-ness. He seemed to both resent everything about being a cat, yet at the same time, take a martyred pride in it. The cat food Kathy bought for him would disappear at mealtimes (though she had to admit that she had never actually seen him _eat_ it) while he looked scornfully at Sandy scrounging chicken curry, or spaghetti and meatballs, or cheese on toast from Kathy.

While Kathy worked in the library, he would glare at her and Sandy from atop a bookshelf, moving only to twitch his tail in agitation when Sandy moved to book-sitting mode. He wasn’t quite as good as Sandy at appearing unexpectedly in places, and made a point of meowing and chirruping when it seemed to be expected. He even chased and caught a moth in the library one day, which, judging by his reaction, only surprised and annoyed him.

He certainly didn’t purr like Sandy did. In fact, the more affectionate Sandy was with Kathy, the more aloof Pitch seemed determined to be. It was almost as if, Kathy thought, Pitch was trying to show Sandy he could be a better cat than him—even if he felt this whole ‘cat’ thing was rather ridiculous. Really, he was much better at being a cat when he thought no one was looking. Nervously graceful and fluid as a shadow, and prone to hopping sideways with his tail fluffed out when Sandy appeared unexpectedly from around the corner.

Kathy could never figure out why he did that. After all, Sandy seemed to only want to cuddle with him, or maybe groom him, if he would ever sit still enough for it.

One day, in late October, Kathy was pleasantly surprised by Pitch approaching her out of nowhere, though alarmed when she found this was probably due to the fact that he had a large splinter in his right front paw. She gathered him up and carried him off to her bathroom, where she removed the splinter with the tweezers from her first aid kit, while Sandy looked on, distressed.

Pitch meowed at him resentfully as the little wound bled, but, astonishingly, didn’t try to run off when Sandy walked over and started to lick it clean.

“What, now you’re getting along?” Kathy asked. Pitch hissed at her and she set him down on the tile.

“Hi, Professor O, this is Kathy. I know it’s like…4am in Russia right now, but I was just hoping you could call me back. I’ve got some questions about your cat…cats?”

Message from O: Cats? Don’t own any cats. Probably you’re seeing a stray that’s been drinking the milk I leave out for the Folk.

“Maybe _you_ are the Folk,” Kathy said, looking up at Pitch and Sandy after darkening the screen of her phone. Sandy was sitting on a book, as usual, but Pitch wasn’t in his usual perch. Instead, he stalked through the bookshelves, looking intently at the spines of the books, as if he was not only reading them, but looking for something specific. Suddenly he stopped before a shelf and started caterwauling at the top of his lungs. Then, to Kathy’s great surprise, he leapt what must have been eight feet straight up, and sunk his claws into one of the books on the upper shelves.

“Holy shit! No! Bad cat!” Kathy imagined telling Professor O that one of his priceless books had been clawed to pieces by a stray cat. Even the potential look of disappointment made her stomach sink.

Pitch simply yowled louder, finally stopping when Kathy got a stepstool and took down the book he had clawed. Strangely, there didn’t seem to be any damage, and she was going to put it back when he started up the yowling again. He shut up when she, used to Sandy’s book recommendations by now, began to flip through the volume. “One Hundred Nightmares of Ye Golden General” she read aloud. “Oh please God don’t be printed with the long s.” It wasn’t, thankfully, and the content looked intriguing as well, though she couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be an allegory, a novel, or philosophical musings. Whatever it was, it all had to do with nightmares.

“My dissertation isn’t on nightmares, you know,” she said to Pitch, who glared at her and began to clean his tail. She sighed. “Then again, there’s room for a chapter on them, why not? I mean, they’re kind of part of dreams, right?” She glanced at Sandy to find that he was staring at her intently, his low purr filling the room and making her feel a little lightheaded—like the library was a tiny observation deck hanging over a canyon as deep as time and as wide as the Milky Way.

Pitch jumped up on the table and headbutted him and he stopped, looking a little sheepish, while Pitch stared at him, settling down with his legs tucked beneath him and his tail curled around him, performing cat-ness with utmost formality.

Kathy put her hand to her forehead. “I…think I’d better go take a nap. Um. And maybe not dream?” Why the hell am I saying this to the _cats_? She wondered, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that had overtaken her as Sandy had purred.

When she returned from her nap, she found Pitch and Sandy curled up together, nose to nose and tail to tail. They reminded her of Halloween like that. Or of a ying-yang. They looked cozy, and Kathy realized that she had been expecting this from the moment Pitch showed up. And yet… “Let’s get a few things straight,” Kathy said. “If you’re not cats, I’d really appreciate it if you’d keep looking like cats. But I’m not going to freak out yet because you’ve been helping me with my dissertation. Just…Sandy, can you take it easy on the purring? I don’t want to find out that it’s the resonance frequency of reality. You too, Pitch. Though I don’t know what would make you purr.” The black cat opened his eyes in slits and snuggled closer to Sandy. “Right. And you don’t have to pretend to eat the cat food if you don’t want to. Cool. I’m going to light a fire and…I guess read that book you showed me.”

_fault all settled in orange fluffyfur only catshaped never tried to be a cat really_

The notwhisper flowed from the black cat as the orange cat nudged him towards the rug in front of the fire.

_so saying always catlike? don’t play with things socruel just like warmsleeping goodfood happyfurnacemind_

_so give other catlikeness here?_

_too much immersed didn’t know were going to get moth till it happened_ Laughter like blue sky.

The black cat wrinkled his nose and curled up with his face towards the fire. Once he was settled, the orange cat fit against him like a semiliquid puzzle piece and purred as catlike as he could. After a pause, the black cat began to purr as well, very quietly, so the human wouldn’t be able to hear.

_curious about her_

_now who immersed?_

_going to give up rationalframewriting soon enough, going to stay so transition is gladopening_

_will stay too then sweetpoetry needs coldwinds_

_yesyes_

_yesyes_

The fire crackled as the wind began to pick up outside. Inside, two cats fell asleep by the fire, pressed so closely together they almost seemed to make up one strange being. Two other things awakened elsewhere. And Kathy read, and began to find what she was looking for, though she didn’t know it yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Tags and Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> #I said I didn't like animal transformation fluff and now here it is
> 
> sylphidine reblogged this from gretchensinister and added:  
> Finding this buried in my desktop bookmarks, rather than in my Tumblr likes, makes me think this is one of the first RotG things I ever read, probably found through a Google search string involving Pitch and cats.  
> I remember being confused and amused by the tag “dumb eldritch abomination husbands”. Oh, how little I knew, back in April 2015, what this lovely fandom would mean to me.
> 
> bowlingforgerbils said: I am so very tempted to bow down and yell “We’re not worthy!” a la Wayne’s World. This was brilliant.


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